Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

April 15, 2016

Good news for liberal-arts majors: “Behind Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are not just software engineers. Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools.” (“The Next Hot Job in Silicon Valley Is for Poets,” Washington Post.)

November 21, 2014

In Fort Collins, Colorado, a Mexican restaurant chain called Illegal Pete’sis being targeted by immigrant-rights groups that say the name is derogatory and offensive because of “the i word,” as in “illegal immigrant.” The chain’s owner, Pete Turner, opened the first Illegal Pete’s in 1995; he told the New York Times the name “was inspired by the name of a bar in a novel and by his late father, also named Pete, who had a rebellious streak.” “I never intended it to be about undocumented immigrants,” Turner told the Times. “Never. Not once.” Turner, who calls himself a pro-immigrant liberal, says he gave serious consideration to a name change. But in early November he announced, in a long letter on the company website, that he’d decided against it. Readers’ comments have been almost unanimously supportive.

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This week Toyota announced that it would start selling a hydrogen fuel cell sedan in 2015 (sticker price: $57,500). The futuristic car has a name to match: Mirai, which means “future” in Japanese.

The name sounds good to non-Japanese ears, too. Mira means “look” in Spanish, “aim” or “objective” in Italian, and “watch intensely” in French. In Sanskrit it means “ocean,” a fitting association with hydrogen. And in the Slavic languages mir means peace.

[O]ur English word “future” is firmly rooted in an Indo-European belief that it will come to pass / be / exist. The Sinitic term, in contrast, is more skeptical, and indicates an uncertainty about the very possibility of that which has not yet arrived. It seems to me that, if we accept the philosophical implications of the term, mirai / wèilái will keep receding and never quite arrive.

Print magazines, once dismissed as dead-tree relics, are proving to be pretty hardy after all. California Sunday, an independent monthly (for now) that’s distributed with the state’s biggest newspapers, made a splashy debut October 5. Now Airbnb, the lodging-rental company that’s out to disrupt the hospitality industry, has launched Pineapple, a quarterly publication for hosts (who may choose to share it with their paying guests). According to a New York Times article, the 128-page winter 2014 issue carries no advertising and contains features on San Francisco (where Airbnb is headquartered), London, and Seoul.

Why Pineapple? For centuries—since Columbus’s second voyage, according to some accounts—the fruit has symbolized hospitality and luxury. Pineapple names and images are common in the hospitality industry, and pineapple tchotchkes abound.

“It Couldn’t Please Me More” (The Pineapple Song) from the stage version of Cabaret (cut, sadly, from the movie). So rare! So costly! So luxurious! I searched in vain for a clip from the original Broadway show, in which the immortal Lotte Lenya played Fraulein Schneider.

March 19, 2014

“We’ve turned learning vocabulary into an addictive game,” says Vocabulary.com, which this week announced its new app (iPhone and iPad only, for now). Vocabulary.com’s chief technology officer, Mark Tinkler, told Fast Company that some people play “over 10 hours a day. It’s crazy.”

You’ve probably heard about Facebook COO Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s campaign to ban the “bossy” descriptor for girls and women. Perhaps you’ve tangentially wondered, as I did, why cows are frequently called “Bossy,” at least in the U.S. There are two theories, and “no matter which of the two theories you pick, you end up in Latin.” (World Wide Words)

I attended my first roller derby match a couple of weekends ago, and couldn’t believe my ears when the announcer said that Fatal Dreidel would be skating for the Oakland Outlaws. Not only is that her actual nom de derby, it turns out there’s a whole subgenre of Jewish derby pseudonyms, including Mayhem Bialik, Yom Tripper, and Hebrewno Mars. (Jewniverse, via Diane Fischler.)

For more on derby names, see my May 2011 linkfest and law professor Dave Fagundes’s “Talk Derby to Me” (great title!), on “intellectual property norms governing roller derby pseudonyms,” published in 2012 in the Texas Law Review.

The Embassy Suites campaign started in 2012, a leap year, with the theme “366 Days of More.” (The campaign ended last week.) Nounified more also showed up in “our insane devotion to always giving you more of more” and “a more-tastic amount of more.” The ads were directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford.

Now, more, like good, is sometimes a real noun, as in “The more you read the more you know.” Note the definite article, though. Embassy Suites’ more isn’t that kind of more; it’s a nounified modifier.

The insurance company Safeco has it both ways with more:

"It’s like a museum. I’m afraid to touch anything.”

The tagline in these ads is “Some people want more out of life. We insure the things that make more possible.” “More out of life” is an idiom that functions as a noun (the object of want); while in make more possible, more functions as “moreness.” Or maybe “more more-tastic moreness.” Who knows.

March 02, 2012

HotelChatter spots a recent trend in hotel naming: single-word brands “that hardly even communicate that these are hotels where you can spend the night.” The newest example they cite is Even (which does, actually, suggest evening activity); others include Public, Edition, and Commune. “Commune”? As in, “Tonight it’s your turn to make the lentil-millet stew”? (Via Name Wire.)

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I can’t pass up anotheropportunity to write about Fifth Third Bancorp, the Cincinnati-based bank whose name is legendary in verbal-branding circles. (It’s the result of a long-ago merger, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make jokes about it.) This week the bank revealed its new tagline, which exhibits a refreshing element of wit rarely seen in financial marketing: “The Curious Bank.” The bank’s chief marketing officer claimed the tagline had something to with “our DNA” (yes, it’s that old biological determinism again!), but he isn’t fooling me. “Fifth Third” is a curious name in the funny-peculiar sense, and if the people who work there are curious in the asking-better-questions sense, so much the better. In taglines, unlike in other corporate communications, a little ambiguity is a good thing.

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MATTER is a new online magazine with an unusual focus: each week it will publish a single piece of long-form journalism about science or technology. If that sounds to you like an iffy proposition in an era of tweets and sound bites, consider this: the magazine was fully funded on Kickstarter, to the tune of $75,000, in just 38 hours. As a lapsed journalist myself, I’m eager to see what the editorial team (based here in the Bay Area) will produce. I’m also enthusiastic about the name, which works—like most good names—on multiple levels: it simultaneously suggests reading material, the physical sciences, and “to be of importance.”

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Speaking of good names—and of focus—the ambitious new camera called Lytro began shipping this week. Lytro looks like no camera you’ve ever seen, and its technology is equally innovative: it allows you to focus after you’ve captured the image. (Read a New York Times Gadgetwise post that called the camera “astonishing”; see a diagram of how it works.) The name is brilliant—far better than the drearily descriptive original name, Refocus Imaging. “Lytro” suggests “light” and “nitro”—as in exploding old ideas—and the slightly tweaked spelling makes it feel revolutionary but not difficult. Even the letterforms contribute to the name’s effect: the sharp angles of the L, Y, and T are balanced by the lenslike O (subtly emphasized in the logo). Great work by Anthony Shore of Operative Words, who was hired by Sequence Branding of San Francisco to do the naming.

“Like exactly what you’d expect in a casino that’s in Nevada, but not in Vegas.”

“Where everybody knows your name.”

“And everything looks just like everyone’s idea of a Nevada casino.”

“Hey, I’ve got it…”

If you prefer your clichés to include flashing lights and unclad young women, Harrah’s has a weirdly named attraction for you, too. Behold the VEX Nightclub.

Does nobody over there own a dictionary?

According to a case study on the Philips Color Kinetics website, the club’s design involved “the latest in LED lighting technology,” especially on “the club’s signature Go-Go dancer catwalks.” The LED sources are controlled by something called a Video System Engine and a DMX system, so maybe—I’m trying to be generous—VEX is some sort of abbreviated acronym.

Once you’re aware of the trend, you start noticing examples everywhere. Here are three recent sightings of my own.

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B Hotels & Resorts, an “upper-upscale” hotel chain (Travel Weekly’s adjective), was launched last week at The Lodging Conference. The South Florida company will acquire and convert existing companies rather than build its own. Corporate VP Christopher Tompkins used to work for the W hotel chain (a Starwood brand); he stresses that B is no mere copycat, but it's hard not to see certain parallels. According to Travel Weekly:

Like W . . . the brand plays off its one-letter name. Where W has adopted a “whenever, wherever” motto, B uses its one-letter name with all of its programs. “B green,” for example, emphasizes its environmental consciousness, “B activities” its fitness program and “B indulge” its spa.

According to HotelWorld Network, other brand extensions will include “B in Touch” (complimentary Internet access), “B Active” (fitness centers), and the B’stro (dining).

Cute wordplay, but wouldn’t “upper-upscale” be better conveyed by an “A”?

Disney Institute was created in 1986 to teach “Disney’s brand of business excellence” to the leaders of non-Disney businesses. Recent ads use the D from the familiar Disney logo (originally Walt Disney’s signature) as a prefix.

Fortune magazine, July 26, 2010.

Don’t ask me to explain that photo. Business guys thinking inside the box? Running around with their heads cut off?

And I wonder about the headline, too. Should we interpret it as “De-think”? That’s a little D’pressing.

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GapBody Fit, which uses the letter G in its product nomenclature, is a sub-brand of a sub-brand.

Gap Body—a line of women’s underwear and personal-care products—has been around since 1998. The new sub-brand, which launched earlier this month, is “a chic new sport collection built for speed, flexibility, and balance,” according to the Gap email I received—in other words, an attempt to claim some territory from yoga-chic retailers such as Lululemon. (And, possibly and puzzlingly, to cannibalize sales at Athleta, a women’s fitness-wear company acquired by Gap* for $150 million in 2009.) Although the line includes tops and shorts, the identifying G prefix applies, so far, only to stretchy bottoms: gfast, gbalance, gstretch, and gflex.

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My own letter grade for these efforts? B as in B-ware. Single-letter brands are open to misinterpretation: See, for example, Drake University’s “D+” ad campaign, which earned failing marks from nearly everyone who saw it. Single letters are also (a) hard to find in online searches and (b) bereft of emotional benefits. Finally, as Steve Baird observes, “It is not easy to own a single-letter as a trademark, at least one that enjoys any meaningful scope.”

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The Times article to which I link contains a paragon of Buzzwordish, from Gap’s chairman and CEO: “This strategic acquisition complements our brands perfectly and allows us to leverage our new online platform to expand into this significant retail sector.”

February 28, 2008

Sodexho, the French multinational food services company, has dropped its aitches and become Sodexo. And last month it gave its logo an all-lower-case Web 2.0-ish slant:

Armin at the design blog Brand New (where I found the side-by-side logo comparison) is skeptical:

Sodexo has fallen into the trap of thinking lowercase makes for a friendlier logo. I don't see a rational reason behind this change.

It's the same irrationality behind the recent Xerox logo change, which also involved lower-case-ification.

In the new Sodexo logo, the curving red element is supposed to represent a smile. But its lopsided skew resembles like nothing so much as the slash of red lipstick a three-year-old applies to her face while playing dress-up.

And what about the spelling change? Sodexho was a compression of Societé d'Exploitation Hotelière (Hotel Services Company). In its 2006-2007 annual report, the company explained the decision to de-aitch by saying that "in certain languages an 'x' followed by an 'h' is difficult to pronounce."

Sodexo was founded in 1966. It took them 40 years to discover this little language problem?

Commenters to Armin's post focused mostly on the logo redesign, which they mostly disliked, but Chris observed:

Biggest improvement would be they took out that "h" in the brand name. Take the "od" out of "Sodexho" and you'll get what we called them in college.

But enough about Patty. Let's talk about the dog. Specifically, the dog's name. On paper she's "Shann's Legally Blonde." But she picks up her ears and smiles a doggy smile when you call her "Diva."

Then again, who doesn't? Once upon a time, the term (which means "goddess" in Italian) was applied highly selectively, and with all due respect, to opera megastars such as Maria Callas. These days, everyone with a pair of X chromosomes is a diva. We're so democratic! Divacratic, even.

Consider this selective sampling from the brand-o-sphere:

Diva Cup®--"not a tampon, not a pad"--is a reusable silicone "menstrual solution," and without being overly graphic, I'll just say it's the least diva-esque product imaginable. (Full disclosure: I have used a similar product, and ladies, it truly is the answer to your prayers. Go get one.)

Divabetic wants to "makeover [sic] your diabetes." The organization sponsors events that are "your gateway to finding answers, feeling inspired and learning new ways to live well with diabetes while enjoying an exciting mix of free beauty and fashion services." The name was one of those coup de foudre things that happen when divas walk among us: "While attending a tribute concert to Luther Vandross ... [organization co-founder] Max [Szadek] coined the word 'divabetic' after watching Ms. Patti LaBelle reveal in her own sassy way that she was living with diabetes." Sign me up, girlfriend!

Hotel Diva, in San Francisco's theater district, calls itself a "Sexy Boutique Hotel" (caps sic). According to the hotel's designer, "hotels are about ... sleeping in a new bed, great linens, using as much hot water as you want, room service, getting up late, and having sex in the middle of the day." Now that's direct marketing.

The story of Coral, who was left permanently paralyzed by a hit-and-run driver. She touched and inspired people wherever she went, and now her legacy lives on as the official spokesdog for disabled animals everywhere.

Happy Valentine's Day, all you divas, human and otherwise. And smooches to you dudes, too.

February 13, 2007

In an attempt to "push the 353-room hotel further upscale" and "transform the Marina City property into into a more chic and luxurious destination," Gemstone Hotels & Resorts International LLC is renaming Chicago's House of Blues Hotel. The new name, to be unveiled in May: Hotel Sax Chicago.

Some free advice for the Gemstone team: be veeeery careful with those Midwestern vowels. Nothing kills the "chic, luxurious, upscale" image like the impression that you're charging by the hour.